Come this May,you could be witnessing Initial Public Offering from Facebook according to the report from “All Things Digital”. Facebook would be going public mostly during the third week of May.

It’s been a long term plan for Facebook which was planning for an IPO. Facebook in November said it is targeting the second quarter of 2012 for it’s stock offering. The recent evaluation of Facebook touched nearly $100 billion and Initial Public Offering from Facebook would be the largest from technology company

A prominent analyst from Enderle Group told “An IPO from Faceebook will shape the future of the Industry and as many company’s will base their own IPO decisions on the outcome of a Facebook offering”. Social networking site LinkedIn’s shares prices doubled within minutes of trading on New York Stock Exchange last year.A lot has also been expected from Facebook IPO during May this year

When Search Plus Your World was launched by Google a few days back it also marked the exit of ability to block web sites from search results. Google says the feature will return back but the timing was not disclosed.

How Blocking Worked

Previously the results contain a “Block All” link that appeared below them. Selecting this option will not display pages in the search results of the site you blocked. This option no longer appears.

Return of Blocking Will Take “Some Time”

The feature has been dropped earlier this week and Google told they are working on a fix.Search Plus Your World is still in the process of being rolled out. It’s only a short term problem and and it might take some time.

Response to Relevancy Complaints

The blocking site feature was released last February that allowed users to block sites only if they used Google Chrome. A lot of criticisms were made on Google that their relevancy had decreased to a great extent. Google have also addressed regarding this issue in their official blog.The ability to block sites, along with Google’s Panda Update, were part of that response.

Google has received criticism from Twitter on it’s major search update that was unveiled on Tuesday. Twitter claimed that it’s totally “bad” for web users as the update has made it harder for the users to find information.

The recent update Search Plus Your World allows Google to show results in SERP from it’s social networking platform in order to offer a personalized search experience for the users.

Twitter in a statement told that latest enhancements will not help the search engine giant when it comes to providing real time personalized information within its search results.

The statement said “Twitter accounts and Tweets are often the most relevant (search) results,” .”We’re concerned that, as a result of Google’s changes, finding this information will be much harder for everyone. We think that’s bad for people, publishers, news organizations and Twitter users.”

Alex Macgillivray tweeted that ” the update from Google is a bad day for internet”.Both Google and Twitter are battling for dominance in the social market which is currently headed by Facebook.

Come 2012 and Google has introduced quite a lot of features thats going to bring clarity to many features they have made over the past few months.These changes include the creation of their own social media network and implementation of SSL search. Over the next few days in Google.com you will be witnessing their new change called “Search Plus Your World”.

The new feature will bring results from Google+ in the search results at the click of a button.The results include People,Pages and Profiles that are fully integrated into search results.

When personalization icon is clicked for a search query it pulls out posts and pictures from their friends circle into their search results.Already in the search results Google + posts have began to outperform the original content. The new icon personalizes the search results to those within the user’s network that includes even the content shared privately.

The results does not show anything related to Facebook or Twiiter and this helps Google+ to promote their social network.Regarding this Amit Singhal said “Facebook and Twitter and other services, basically, their terms of service don’t allow us to crawl them deeply and store things. Google+ is the only [network] that provides such a persistent service. Of course, going forward, if others were willing to change, we’d look at designing things to see how it would work.”

Check out this video to know more about Search, plus Your World

Time has come for say big “goodbye” to low quality link building altogether.The Panda update was primarily focused on low quality sites that had bad linking practises.

A lot of questions remain in the mind of link builders that competitors are ranking high because of thousands of pure spam links.

Here is a way to find low quality and high volume links in your analysis:

1. A big brand with a quite good reputation is good enough to rank for a particular keyword.

2.If it not then Google is close enough to crack those sites giving no space for spammy backlinks

How to Determine a Valuable Backlink Oppurtunity

You need to determine whether the backlink you are obtaining from a site is valuable.Here are some signs that makes Google to deem a site as low quality

1. Lots of Ads

If the site is covered with lots of advertising chunks or with five blocks of Adsense then you need to stay away from them

2. Lack of quality content

If your article gets approved immediately in a site then this is not the site for your needs. If poorly written articles are approved easily then Google’s algorithm has no other go other than acting harsh on your site.

3.Lots of content,low traffic

Blogs with a PageRank of 6 looks like a great place to spam a comment. If the blog lacks authority in terms of traffic and social sharing then it has a lot of chance to be devalued in the future.In previous cases Page Rank did not save the site from Panda Update.

4. Lack of Moderation

Lack of moderation can prove costly and you need to moderate your blog comments.When lots of spammy links are present in a page,you don’t want yours to go next to it.

It’s high time you need to change your link building strategies according to recent algorithmic changes. Feel free to share your thoughts on linkbuilding

Social Media is getting crowded and now it’s Microsoft’s time to introduce their social network So.cl. This is not their attempt to compete with Facebook, Google+ or Twitter.

It is a network that is aimed at helping students interested in social media. Microsoft calls it a “a research experiment for students focused on combining web browsing, search, and social networking for the purposes of learning.”

The Search functions of So.cl is powered by Bing’s API and encourages students to create rich web contents visually. While you search the links are shared automatically when there are other students looking for the same thing. A feature called “Video Party” let you search and you can make a note of movies which you can watch together with friends.

So.cl is only available to students of information and design schools in Syracuse University, Newyork University and University of Washington. It also provides the opportunity for the students to create customized social tool for their own community.

FAQ part of So.cl reads “We hope to encourage students to reimagine how our everyday communication and learning tools can be improved, by researching, learning and sharing in their everyday lives.”

Read FUSE Labs blog to know more about it.

Out of world’s top 100 brands,77 have Google+ brand page.According to Bright Edge there has been a 50 percent increase in the number of fans adding their favorite brands to their circles and this amounts to 222,000 fans.

There are 300 million fans for the same brand on Facebook compared to 148,000 on Google +. Brands like IBM,Vodafone and Google have a Google+ page but not an official Facebook page.

The social and search channel gap in Google is closing up as Google is embedding popular product with it’s dominant search marketing position. The brands need to address both channels and it’s now their choice to extend their social presence from Facebook to Google+.

Brands are now offering incentives to include one of their pages as part of their search and social strategy such as the inclusion of Google+ pages in primary search results.There has also been a speculation around this move that it could lead google to anti trust woes.

Including Google+ pages in the search results is a smart move by Google and a recent survey found that Google,Yahoo contributes 34 percent of Facebook fan page referrals.A few questions like whether this could abuse Google’s dominant position in the market if it still contributes further remains to seen.

Sponsored Stories will be rolled out by Facebook in the news feed. From January ads will be rolled out which allows the brand to reach friends of users who have interacted with their pages.A like or comment is enough for the brands to interact with the users.

Users will be able to see sponsored stories in the news feed about people or friends they are connected to. Sponsored stories of pages which users are not a fan or friend will not be visible for the users.

Facebook spokeperson Annie Ta told “We want to be really thoughtful about this, so we’ll have a lot of rate limits in place. We hope to show people no more than one Sponsored Story in their News Feeds per day and we’ll clearly label the story. They’ll also be of the same size and treatment as other stories in News Feed.”

Sponsored Story Feed will soon be available in the ticker which appears in the upper right hand part of the site. There was no information about the brands that would be part of the roll out.The price of the news feed ad units was also not determined.Sponsored stories in the news feed will not be extended to mobile

A new report named “Author Stats” has been introduced by Google recently. Google search results page will contain how often your page is showing up and this will be available under section called “labs” in Webmaster tools. When the content is associated with the Google,the impressions and clicks of the stories will be shown.

In case if you find any issues,you can mail them at authorship-pilot@google.com. More by link has also been added in the search results by Google

New features have been unrolling in Google Analytics since August when version 3 was launched.Google Analytics was in need of a new API and now developers have delivered it.

Data Export API has now been replaced by Google Analytics Core Reporting API which is right now the hot cake for Google Analytics Developers. The current Analytics API is both the continuation of the previous API and not to mention the Javascript Client Library which is currently in Alpha.

The two versions that are currently available in Core Reporting API are Version 2.4 and Version 3.0. The latter version contains new libraries for languages like PHP, Ruby and Python whereas former version is legacy release to maintain compatibility with the previous versions.

Significant changes are available in version 3.0 PAPI starting with authentication through the OAuth 2.0 format, but also in the use of JSON(Javascript for Object Notation) format for data output and absolutely no backwards compatibility with the previous version 2.3. The API team recommends the developers to migrate to 3.0 version.

If custom apps or interfaces are developed using 2.3 API,it needs to be updated within 6 months. Data Export API,XML requests and configuration will not be available at that time.

JSON(Javascript Object Notation) will be replacing XML as the preferred format for returning data.The new features will continue to roll out in 2012 as announced by Google and developers will be working on the API to make the new features more accessible.